Start Research by Brainstorming What
are some words and phrases people commonly use to describe the broad focus areas of your blog? What searches, if people performed them and found you, would be most likely to bring you new lifelong fans? What searches that are relevant to your posts do you wish you had the #1 ranking for? If you had to make new content to reach the largest, relevant audience to your blog, what would your write about?

Eventually, You Want a List
of Targets A spreadsheet like this (or an even simpler one without difficulty, ranking, or volume) can nudge you to take be mindful and actionable about your blog’s SEO

Some KWs Are Worth Long
Term Pursuit For Moz, this phrase is critical to our thought leadership and community building efforts

Others Are Simply How You
Optimize a Post While I’m bummed our post didn’t rank for this exact phrase, it does rank for variants and we can always try again with another post in the future.

When Writing a Post, 3mins
is All I Ask First 60 Seconds Next 60 Seconds Last 60 Seconds Use tools or suggest to figure out which KW phrase to target Note some of the additional terms & phrases that can help you be relevant for additional search queries Try to employ the key terms in the title of your post, and use the additional queries in the title and body of the post in a sensible, readable way.

If You’re Prioritizing, I Recommend:
1) Make Yourself Proud – publish content you yourself believe in and feel confident promoting. 2) Delight Your Audience – empathetically serve their needs. Launch work they will want to share. 3) Make it Search Accessible – publish in such a way that search engines can match your content to their searchers’ keywords and intent.

What to Look For in
a Link: Can Send Relevant Traffic– linking sites don’t have to be “on-topic” to drive relevant traffic, but the links themselves should be tied to potential visitor interest, i.e. someone might actually click them Editorial– the link should be given because the publisher/author truly wants to endorse your site or the content of a page and not due to an exchange of goods/services/money Trustworthy Source– if the site(s) regularly links to low quality sites, is itself sketchy, or can be influenced by anyone (open to link drops), the links you get there may come with serious risk of a Google penalty

More Link Building Resources: Link
Building from the Moz Blog Paddy Moogan’s Link Building eBook Experts’ Favorite Link Building Tactics How to Leverage PR for Link Building The Future of Link Building

Don’t Worry About Spam You
Don’t Control: If you see spammy links in your profile that you didn’t create, don’t worry about them. If you see a lot and want to take action, you can use Google Webmasters’ disavow tool.

DO WORRY About Spam You
Created If you’re guilty, fess up, disavow, try to remove the links, and send an honest reconsideration request

SEO Plugins for Blogs Can
Be a Good Start, But Aren’t the End All of SEO Yoast’s Wordpress SEO is a great tool, and it can help you avoid problems and capture opportunities, but it’s not a silver bullet!